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"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company." (aus.social)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 151 points 2 years ago* (9 children)

This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.

Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.

Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren't directly profiting with ads.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren't a robot.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn't OCR

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could've filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you're human, and one word scanned from Google's book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha

    Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn't want them having access to it

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This is a bit of "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn't been monetized you can always say 'yet'

    FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn't get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.

    If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you're just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform...

    🤭 LOL @ the name change.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as "OpenMicrowave" on the Google app store

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp's license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don't agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.

    And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.

    That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn't be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don't risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.

    In the case of Duolingo, it's pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.

    Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there's still a copy left to access.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work

    The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.

    Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.

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